SOFTMARK AG

Cognitive Computing

Nosco

Think The Future

Cognitive Enhancement

Nosco (Latin: “I get to know”) is a multilingual Web-Site https://www.think-the-future.com for scenario analysis, trend research and prognosis in Corporate Foresight. It can be used by corporations of any size for mission-critical applications in strategy, riskmanagement, marketing studies and stress-testing. Its aim is to foresee future developments, to identify probable aberrations early, to inform adequate reaction and most importantly enable pre-emption. Concomitantly, Nosco develops target-achievement strategies, on the one hand to reach desired end-points, in terms of timing and quality, on the other hand to present different optional methods of approach.

The concept is based on the principles of Collaborative Cognitive Computing, by which Nosco evaluates users’ input information (Swarm Intelligence) and automatically interprets and learns Internet data in order to build up an intelligent platform to inform and optimize strategic thinking. The brokerage function concurrently delivers intelligent abstracts about developments, risks and solution strategies and sends them via e-mail automatically to the users. We see an interesting Web-Business Case, in which users publish their scenarios and/or subscribe to preconfigured scenarios (templates of scenarios) from other users at respective costs. By continuous feedback and validations of the contents through the community, scenarios reach a constantly improving quality in terms of Swarm Intelligence.

Technology

Nosco is based on Coglet-Technology, developed, documented and patented by Softmark AG. Coglet-Technology represents a software architecture consisting of factors and interrelations between those factors. In contrast to the usual architectural concepts, all interrelations are represented according to the principles of neurophysiology, which typically works not via mathematical correlations, but via multiscalar and time-critical impulses. Impulses describe effects in distinct qualities like type, latency, strength, duration and profile. Furthermore this neural architecture not only describes point-to-point interrelations, but also interrelations of point-to-point interrelations, which results in a highly sophisticated concept with a strong basis in neural reality.

Via Web-Crawling (semantic analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP)) the software is able to automatically analyse different data sources from the Internet, such as newsfeeds, Twitter, EMails, other Web-Sites, ontologies, archive data, databases, Social Media Data Blogs, Big Data in e.g. Reuters, Bloomberg etc. All this information is used for sentiment and interrelations analyses, making it easy to configure new scenarios on the basis of a growing, self-learning knowledge network. Over the time, Nosco gets an increasing overview how different users define certain impacts in terms of time-dependency, profile and multiscalarity. This averaged information then can be used by others in terms of swarm intelligence to create new scenarios or change existing ones. By this, Nosco represents the basis for a “Democratization of Cognition”.

The software architecture of Nosco differs fundamentally from conventional neural networks in informatics. By imitating the concepts of neurophysiology, Nosco has an USP in terms of technology.

The idea behind Nosco

In an increasingly complex world with permanently changing players, driving values and frame conditions, cognitive assistance by intelligent systems is required to improve one´s thinking abilities.

Humans, at least in the western societies, are mainly trained and focussed on data collection and statistical evaluations in order to cope with complexities, but have huge problems in thinking in terms of time-critical and variable impacts of all those data in a holistic way. Whenever there are big quantities of influencing factors, characterized by their respective qualities and quantities in a time-dependent context, it is nearly impossible for a human to foresee what effects might take place over the time. Beyond that, humans have huge problems in disctincting relevant effects from less relevant side effects often losing themselves in time consuming and senseless detail evaluations.

Nosco works like the human brain, where interconnected neural structures generate initially unprecise decision patterns which get more and more concrete in circular processes, finally resulting in distinct results. Unlike neural networks in informatics, in neurophysiology we do not see any mathematical correlations of interrelations, but dynamic impulses with changing time-critical impulse qualities, which describe the real world best.

Nosco uses scaled impulses, as effects are not always the same but might differ in even a paradoxic way depending on general conditions. As an example we see the different effects of caffeine on patients. While it has stimulating effects on young people, it can be used as a sleeping medication for elderly people.